


Show Me Your Teeth

by pergamentum_exit



Category: Near Dark (1987)
Genre: Animal Death, Character studies, Dead People, Gore, Multi, Original Character(s), Pre-Canon, Prequel, Rating May Change, homer is a creep, mulit-era, severen is batshit, vampire sex eventually
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-04
Updated: 2021-03-04
Packaged: 2021-03-17 06:40:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,464
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29837553
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pergamentum_exit/pseuds/pergamentum_exit
Summary: Don’t think of it as killing. Don’t think at all. Mae isn’t a killer, but in this blood-leeching clan of nomadic vampires to survive is to slaughter and drain. // prequel to Near Dark.
Relationships: Caleb Colton/Mae, Diamondback/Jesse Hooker
Kudos: 4





	Show Me Your Teeth

_Sweetwater, Texas. 1983._

Dark out. Mae pulled to the side of the highway. She ought to be home by now and she’d be at dinner and they’d be having pan-seared chicken with the breadcrumbs caked on the tender skin of it and fried okra. She’d be at the table with her parents and tossing scraps for the dogs under the table and then she could tell them all about it. About the kid.

He’d approached her in the auditorium late after five and said he didn’t understand his homework. Solutions to algebraic expression was what it was. And yeah she’d help him—help this kid solve for whatever letter of the alphabet he was looking for; after all, the introduction of letters in place of numbers is a staggering concept for an 11 year old boy.

But then that was how he got her. Stuck her. And now from behind the wheel of her little Dodge Aries she staunched the blood welling in the punctures. Mae held the inside of her collar pressed to her gouged neck. It stung and she remembered it like it all happened again. Their talk in the auditorium. Their sitting on the stage and his having forgotten his ring binder and his homework clipped in. His general disinterest in retrieving said ring binder. Then his leering at her and his picking at her and the carnal look to him—the bite.

She’d looked to him where he sat across from her on the auditorium floor. He’d forgotten his ring binder; well, that’d be alright. She had her own memory to go on and she wrote out impromptu equations in the college-ruled notebook she used on the regular for biology. She turned the page on _Innate & Learned Behaviors_ and wrote out letters and numbers in clean lines.

“This one,” she told him.

He sat there with his legs stretched over the floor and kept his hands in front of him capping and uncapping a hard case zippo lighter. Mae listened to the chink of it over and over. She watched his hands. They were small and dirty hands. Dirt under the nails, too: something brown and packed.

Under the auditorium lights was the first time she’d looked at him—really looked at him. He was small, or maybe the dark canvas jacket that hung off of him was too big. Most everything on him had that secondhand lived-in look about it: hand-me-downs and thrift store leftovers. Faded black denim with patches on knees and an old and bleached Jethro Tull concert shirt with a hole torn at the seam of the neckline and a pair of browning Converse tied with dead laces.

He looked worn down as the clothes he lived in—he had a round and ashen face and hair limp with grease. Mae watched his dull eyes move over the polished floor and to her hands. Reaching up her arms to her chest. They lingered there for a time and then lifted to her face.

He hadn’t bothered with introductions but spoke to her like he knew her. More and more his talk and manner had less to do with homework or school or any troubles of a kid his age. No it had to do with _her_. Her tastes and her pleasures. Her milky eyes and her sweet face and other delicacies of her own self—he counted out all her delights on his fingers like they were all for him. Mae shifted to her knees.

“Got me salivating,” he said.

He uncapped the lighter with one dusty hand and brought it close to his lips. He touched his tongue to the head of it and the wet underside hissed where it met with the little kerosene flame. He met her eyes as it burned and then closed the case with a dull chink.

And she said nothing but went rigid on the floor, and that kid said nothing back like he expected her to answer to him. And well what was she supposed to tell him—what was there to tell after something like that. Nothing. She watched his eyes and didn’t like the look in them. Too dark and reaching and drinking everything in.

Drinking her.

Mae gathered herself off the floor.

“I have to go.”

He watched after her as she made to leave. There was that animal called terror scratching in her gut and she should have listened. But she didn’t. She didn’t because what could he do to her—he’s 11. And she hadn’t listened but now at a traffic stop on W Bell Rd. the punctures in her throat still bled. She remembered.

She stood over him in the auditorium looking down and the kid licked his lips. He stood after her with his dirtied hands open at his sides.

“I have to go,” she told him again.

He still stared at her, unblinking.

“Don’t have to get to anywhere.”

But she did have to get. She had to get from him. Mae watched him watching her. He leaned in close and the look he gave her—she recognized it—a want; no, a need. He looked at her with a lust uncanny in the eyes of a little boy. Not some small middle school infatuation but something that stirred deeper in him. Something from the loins of him. She knew that look from how other men look at her when they thought she didn’t see. But she sees them all, and he looked much the same as them with his face flushed and his eyes glazed over and wanting.

“You aren’t much my type,” she said.

“No but you’re mine.”

She held her arms rigid. She ought to hit him; hit him and run.

But he was 11.

She took a deep breath.

“Why don’t you chust go and run on home,” she told him. “Run on home. It’s late and your folks’ll be waiting up now go on.”

He smiled then and combed one smudgy hand back through his greasy hair.

“They don’t mind it,” he said.

He held to her wrist now and she tried to pull away but geez he’s got a tough grip for an 11 year old. He wrenched her down to his level and she tore the pages in her composition book with the skidding of her knees to the thin paper. She felt his breath over the top of her ear and then’s when she brought her closed hand slugging down on his little body. 11 or not she’d put a hurting on him.

He let her go and Mae leapt over the heap of him and slammed through the double doors. She took the back stairs two at a time and ran out into the parking lot. She didn’t stop because she heard him over the lot. He was there—the slapping of his old Converse over the pavement. And somehow he caught to her at the door of the car. She got to closing herself in with her legs drawn up in the cab but then he took hold of the handle with his dirt-clogged nails over the chrome.

“Where’re you going off in such a hurry,” he said.

“Chust leave me be.”

She gripped the chromium handle on her side and made to pull the door shut but he forced himself in. He got into the cab and she pinched him there between the door and the frame of it—but then it didn’t matter. He was in and he held to her with a smudged hand to either side of her face. He pulled the rest of himself through with a scuffing of his feet over her stuttering arm. And there he was jumbled up in her lap and she felt his lips pressed to her neck and his small hands tight on her collar and then the smaller prick to her skin like the bite of a stapler to paper corners. It burned.

She pried him off and he sat back on his haunches with the blood on his lip and a wetness where he’d been gnawing at her. She drew one knee up onto the seat and pressed the sole of her boot to his chest, shoving him out. He tipped back over the seats and fell hard onto the cement. She left him sitting on the pavement with his silhouette huddled in the rear mirror as she pulled out of the lot. Sitting here on the side of the highway, her skin red under the stoplight, her eyes held to the rear mirror like he still loitered at the trunk of her car. She’d left him in the parking lot but part of him remained. 

The bite still burned. It itched—his disease in her vein.


End file.
